 Without further ado, I'd like to be able to introduce our guest speaker, Liz Warren, PhD, as a scientist for the International Space Station at NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Dr. Warren previously served as the Deputy Project Scientist for Space Flight Analogs and later for the ISS Medical Project as a science operations lead in NASA's Mission Control Center. She was born and raised in San Francisco, California, probably not too far from our office here, maybe. She has a Bachelor of Science degree in Physiology and a Doctoral Degree in Molecular, Cellular and Integrative Physiology from the University of California, Davis. She completed postdoctoral fellowships in Molecular and Cell Biology and then in Neural Science. Dr. Warren is an expert on the effects of spaceflight on the human body and has been involved with spaceflight research for over 20 years. So I'd like to please welcome Dr. Liz Warren. So here we go. All right. So Time Magazine, is everyone back with me? Sorry about that. Yes, we're all here. Okay. So Time Magazine, late last year, actually late 2014, was kind enough to put Scott on the cover of this issue. But Scott is not the only one spending a year in space. Mikhail Kornenko, a Russian cosmonaut, is also staying the same duration. They launched together and they're going to return together on March 1st. Before I go into much more detail, I want to make sure you guys are aware that you can see the space station flying over in the night sky. If you've never done it, I highly recommend it. Wherever you are, you can type in the location of your town at this website, spotthestation.nasa.gov, and get sighting alerts. And it is really something to see, something that humans built, big enough and bright enough to see in your night sky. So just how big is the space station? Well, we say it's about as big as a football field. It weighs about a million pounds. And it travels, of course, at orbital velocity, plus or minus, about 17,500 miles per hour. Just those three statistics alone impress people who aren't really, maybe they've heard of the space station, but they're not really sure what it is. And then when you mention that 16 nations are working together to have built and operate this laboratory facility in space with the intent of improving life for everyone here on Earth, it's really something pretty special. So NASA's goals aboard the space station include some of those things that I just mentioned. One, advance science so that we can benefit all of mankind. The things that we can learn on the space station enable us to improve life here on Earth. There's a second, actually there's four goals. The second goal is really to enable commercial companies to have access to low Earth orbit to conduct research on topics of their choosing. It doesn't necessarily have to be NASA mission oriented. The third, of course, very important is to enable long duration spaceflight beyond low Earth orbit. We're really a proving ground, if you will, for technologies, for human systems, and all kinds of things for living further out and for longer distances, longer periods. And then the International Space Station is a great model for international cooperation. We could not have done this alone in the United States. The Russians probably could not have done it all on their own. So by working together we really reap the benefits of using each other's strengths. So we generally say that at any one time there's about 250 science experiments ongoing aboard the space station. In total we're close to about 2,000 now adding up everything that we've done and it actually touches at least 95 countries and areas. Now some of those are involved simply by being in contact by a ham radio and educational event or a teacher and student investigation that flew. We do a lot of educational outreach activities. So that's pretty impressive though, 95 countries. And then in the six categories of research I want to mention as well. We do biology and biotechnology, Earth and space science, human research, physical science, education, and technology demonstration and or development. So mostly we're going to be talking about human research tonight because that is really the focus of the one-year mission. Why microgravity? Why is space? Why is this so different, this environment? Well life as we know it has evolved with a constant, constant gravity on Earth. And when you change that variable, when you remove gravity, a lot of aspects change. Everything from the way cells communicate to each other because now the cells are a little more spherical as opposed to a little bit flattened. So everything from a cell all the way to the whole human body reacts differently. I'm sure you've all heard that astronauts lose bone mineral density, their muscles atrophy, their hearts get weaker. That's just the beginning of all of the kind of maladies or mal-effects of space flight. So we'll talk about those next. So this is a kind of a creepy picture I always think, but it's also kind of a fun one because when else do you get to see an astronaut like this? So there's a whole spectrum of changes in the adaptation to space flight and then again in the adaptation to living back on Earth. But we'll kind of focus on those adaptations involved with living in space. So there are some neurovestibular disorders, the inner ear, the organs which tell us which way is up and help us with our balance are really thrown for a loop because they rely on gravity to operate. So without gravity they undergo quite an adjustment period, but usually it only lasts for a few days and we think that's why astronauts experience something called either space motion sickness or space adaptation syndrome, kind of a period where they're just not feeling themselves. And actually it can be fairly severe. People can be throwing up very low appetite, little dehydrated and on the space station where it's kind of work, work, work right away. That's tough to adjust to, but we have medications that help. Vision is really kind of a new thing within the past. I guess it's close to four years now. We started getting complaints from the long duration crew members that their vision over time was kind of getting worse. They were needing adjustments in their glasses or in their prescription and we are finding in some people that is not reversed upon return to Earth. So that's really disconcerting what is going on with the eyes. There's a number of hypotheses and I'll talk about that shortly. The cardiovascular system, our hearts and the whole cardiovascular system is really well adapted to forcing blood up. It takes a lot of work to move a unit of fluid from your toe all the way back to your heart and up to your brain and circulate it all around again and again and again, which is what your cardiovascular system does. Without gravity of course the heart doesn't have to work as hard. So it tends to get a little smaller, lose a little bit of muscle mass. It's not doing the same amount of work. Muscle and bone, you don't use it, you're going to lose it, just like calculus. So bone and muscle experience some atrophy. They lose bone mineral density decreases, very similar to osteoporosis in the elderly. Muscle atrophy occurs without exercise. There would be a bad situation in terms of people coming back, especially after a long duration flight. So we have countermeasures. Those are exercise and nutrition to really help keep the astronauts in shape. It requires close to two hours every day of physical activity and microgravity to maintain or mitigate much of the loss that we see. Immunology, this is a weird one. The immune system in space either goes a little bit haywire, too much active, so they're hyperactive, and some aspects are impaired and aren't as active. We have astronauts getting allergies where they never had allergies before in space. We also have some that experience kind of like over, so that's kind of an overreaction. We also have some that get sick too easily. So that's kind of an impaired function. So the immune system is really a little bit wonky in space. Of course, there's the constant risk of radiation exposure. Fortunately, our Van Allen belts do a really nice job of protecting us in our spacecraft from really extreme radiation, but galactic cosmic rays are a constant threat. They're always coming in. Solar particle events, cosmic radiation. So our astronauts do get more radiation than they would if they were here on the surface of the planet, but it's a risk that is accepted with the job. We do monitor with radiation dosimeters. The amount of radiation that each astronaut individually is exposed to, and we track that over time and try to do an ethical justice of not exposing people to too much. So that's kind of a brief history, a sort of what happens to the human body in space. Most of what we know about the human body in space is all in six-month time frames. Most of the astronauts that go to the space station stay for six months. We also know that a journey to Mars is more like 30 months, 3-0. So we have to start expanding our experience, and that's where this one-year mission comes into play. Let's start learning a little bit more, and so that is what we're doing right now. To address any questions about gender, this slide does a comparison of what we know about what happens with males and what we know about females, at least with a six-month timeframe involved, and you'll see that the responses to microgravity and the responses to spaceflight are similar. There are some minor differences here and there, but from an operational perspective, from a NASA's perspective, there's really no difference in putting together a crew of people to stay in space. Men and women, there's no greater risk either way. You just put together a crew based on skill sets and what we need people to be able to do. So there's really no consideration of men versus women, which begs the question, will we do another one-year mission? And if we do, are we going to send a woman? Above my pay grade right now, we don't know just yet when we will do another one-year mission, if that's in the cards, and we'll get there in our discussion. So here's Scott and Mikhail. I want to tell you briefly that most of the science that we're collecting on these two gentlemen fit into categories like I mentioned before. There's bone and muscle. There's vision impairment. There's cardiovascular studies. There's a couple of really interesting functional studies as well. By that, I mean they're mostly post-flight studies. After these guys get home from space, like in just a week and a half or so, we're going to be doing some pretty intensive examinations of their functional ability. So what does that mean? Can they stand up? Can they walk in a straight line? If we close their eyes, can they still walk in a straight line? Can they open a simulated space craft hatch? Can they climb up a ladder? Can they climb down a ladder? These tests sound really hard after coming back from space after six months, let alone a year. But it's important to get a gauge onto what are their physical capabilities. If you watch a landing or if you watch on March 1st, watch these two guys come home. The capsule lands. There's another gentleman with them, Sergei Volkov. He hasn't been in space quite as long. He'll be in space for about six months. There's a whole crew of people that are there to help extract them from the spacecraft, put them in a kind of an easy chair and monitor them medically and take good care of them. When we go to Mars, there is not going to be a landing party that will help people out of the spacecraft and make sure that they're feeling okay. The folks going to Mars are going to be on their own. So it's really important for us to get a gauge as to what are the functional capabilities of an astronaut the day of landing. How about the next day? How about three days after landing? What we might find is that we'll be advising ourselves for the future. Maybe one of our findings might be after a landing on Mars, nobody gets out of the spacecraft that day. In fact, maybe not for a whole week or more. These are the questions we're trying to answer to inform mission planning for the future. Here's another interesting thing. We say it's one year in space, the year-long mission. As I said, it's actually about 340 days, so it's a little bit short, but you know, I wouldn't tease Scott Kelly about that too much. We've been collecting data on Scott and Mikhail for about a year before they launched, and we're going to continue collecting data for at least a year after they get back down on the ground. So the results, which everyone is very anxious to hear about, they're not going to be ready for at least a year. In some cases, some results might be ready sooner, but we're really collecting a lot of data, and the analysis of that data really isn't going to get going until we have all of the data points all together. So it's going to be a little while before we have solid results to inform us. People ask a lot about the twin study. So this is kind of an aside. We have this one-year mission going on, and serendipitously, because Scott has a twin brother who even more serendipitously is an astronaut and has been to space for about 50, 50 days total. Scott's going to have spent way more than that in space, but they have very similar experiences. They're both Navy jet pilots. They have the same DNA, and so we're curious after a year in space when we compare Scott's DNA to Mark's DNA, are there going to be any changes? And we don't expect anything crazy and significantly mutated, but we do expect we're going to see subtle changes. The telomeres, for example, the way that your chromosomes are packed in each one of your cells, there's something called telomere length. It's the way everything is packed together. The more stress you are exposed to, the more also the older you are, those telomeres kind of get burned up a little bit like a candle wick. And so just by looking at your telomere length, we can assess, well, how stressful your life is. We expect Scott's telomeres are going to be shorter than Mark's when he gets back from space because, well, living in space is stressful. Does that mean that he's a different person? Absolutely not. It just means that some aspects of his DNA and his genetics are going to possibly be transcribed slightly differently from the DNA to the proteins in his body. So that's kind of interesting. And those results, they won't be ready for a little while either, but we're looking forward to seeing those very much. And we expect that it will tell us some interesting things about how the human body really does react to spaceflight. I mentioned vision impairment. So this is not a very new problem, but a lot of people aren't aware of it. As I said, some astronauts, but not all, experience degraded vision in space. We don't know why. I'll repeat that. We don't know why. We know why bones get weaker. We know why muscle gets weaker. We know why the cardiovascular system deconditions. We don't understand what is happening with astronauts' eyes. That means we're going to spend a lot of resources trying to figure this out. And we are. We're spending a lot of crew time and a lot of resources trying to figure out, just characterize why some people lose vision, not go blind, but certainly change their prescription by a few diopters. And others do not. Why is this not reversible in some people when they get back to Earth, but is in others? There's two theories. The leading theory is that that cardiovascular system I mentioned that's really good at pumping fluid up in the upper body. Well, it still does that in space. And you'll notice that astronauts, their faces look a little bit puffy when they're in space. All of that is fluid. It is building up in the upper body. And there's nowhere really for it to go. We might see some increased pressure in the brain or in the back of the eyeballs. We're using a lot of resources to try and figure out what's going on. And it's an area of, like I said, really a lot of research going on. The other theory is that it's related to actually the way the astronauts metabolism work and who is going to be more prone to experiencing vision loss than others. We're not sure about that, but well, when we figure it out finally, it'll possibly change the way we do spaceflight and who we send on long duration missions. So one of the important studies that we're doing in the one-year mission is called fluid shifts. Again, that fluid shift that we see into the upper body, we're trying to characterize. Is it related to changes in vision? So Scott has publicly said, he has noticed that his vision has gotten a little worse over time. So here in the picture, we're using an ultrasound to measure flow through his carotid arteries and jugular veins to see if we can track where the fluid is going, where it's staying. He's actually wearing a special pair of pants called chibis, the Russian vacuum system, essentially. You wear these pants, turn on a vacuum, and the pants literally suck. It's actually lower body negative pressure, but it pulls the astronaut into the pants. It even causes blood flow to return to the lower body almost like gravity. Will that help? Does that make the fluid shift less extreme? Does that improve vision? These are things that we're finding out. They're pretty cool experiments. Also on this one-year mission, we grew some lettuce. This was the first crop that we grew in a new vegetable facility. It's not the first plants ever grown in space, but it was the first crop grown specifically for eating. Some of the lettuce was sent home for microbial testing, but the crew was able to eat some of it as well. People ask, why is the light pink? This is a cool thing. It was figured out by the scientists who designed the veggie facility that of the spectrum, of the light of the full spectrum, roigy biv, plants really only require red and blue to grow. Put red and blue together, you get pink light. It's less, it's more cost effective and energy effective rather than having the full spectrum of like a white LED to just pick the spectrum that the plant needs. Hence the pink light makes it kind of psychedelic up there too. CubeSats. We've deployed CubeSats quite a bit during the year in space. We have a deployment next week actually. CubeSats are where technology is moving. You would be amazed. These CubeSats are pretty small. They can be four inches by four inch cubed. Some of them are bigger as what is pictured, but the technology that is being fit into these small CubeSats is amazing. Commercial companies are launching their own satellites. They get a free ride up to space and get a free deployment from the space station. It's a great deal and all kinds of technologies are being tested. One example is a company called Planet Labs. They're sending satellites to take pictures of Earth and their goal is to have a whole fleet of Earth observing satellites so that at any time, anywhere, instantaneously they can take a picture of something on Earth. Pretty neat goal. They're not there yet. They still have to launch some more satellites, but pretty cool. 3D printing made a lot of big news last year. We tested a 3D printer on orbit. Printed out a working ratchet wrench, which is shown there. It's kind of our first step in being independent of Earth. On the space station, we're close to home in a bad day, bad situation. Get in your escape vessel. You're on your way home. That's not going to be the case when we go to Mars. There's no, you know, well let's change your mind and go back home. You're going to have to be able to be pretty autonomous and having a 3D printer is one of those first steps in being autonomous from Earth. Some of you have heard about our rodent research program. We do have on occasion rodents that are flown to the space station very often by pharmaceutical companies. They test a pharmaceutical drug, maybe in development, on these mice and so what is shown here in the upper left part of the slide, OPG is osteoprotegrin. It's a bone preserving protein which occurs naturally in your body, but the company Amgen was interested in adding extra osteoprotegrin to a pharmaceutical to see if it works and maintaining bone in space. So you can see there's three x-rays there. One on the far left is a mouse that did not receive any extra osteoprotegrin. The normal mouse which received or actually which had normal levels of osteoprotegrin, the mouse on the far right received exogenous or extra osteoprotegrin. All of them were flown in space and you can see the results. The mouse with the extra osteoprotegrin had better bone mass. You can just see it in the x-ray. Amgen, so this is a little bit of an older study. This drug is now available as an osteoporosis drug and get it in your pharmacy. It's called Prolia. So this is an example of a drug that was tested in space on rodents which now is on the market for you and me. Speaking of bone loss, I mentioned that Scott is doing at least two hours of exercise every day to maintain his heart, bones, and muscle. We have, I don't want to say we've solved the bone loss problem, but we have a really good handle on it now. A red is that big kind of gold and blue monstrosity that this astronaut Kevin Ford is working out on. It's able to provide enough loading by using vacuum cylinders as opposed to lifting weights because in a weightless environment. But what we have found is with proper nutrition, some vitamin D supplementation, and intense exercise only possible with A red, we're kind of beating the bone loss problem. We've pretty much mitigated it and that makes us very, very happy and gives us some confidence in going to Mars. However, our next challenge is to make a smaller exercise device that could go to Mars because A red is really big. By the way, A red stands for advanced resistive exercise device. Another topic that we're studying involves fluid behavior. Fluid and fire, they're the most visually compelling examples of why we do research in space. Kind of a stronger force, if you will. It allows us to move fluids without the use of pumps or vacuums or pressure. Fluid will move on its own with surface tension and we're just learning how to do this really well. It may be important for designing fuel tanks for going to Mars, but there's an earth benefit as well. Portable medical diagnostics that don't use power or use very minimal power and very minimal amounts of samples. They can be deployed in the field, medical field, in army or I guess fields of war, but also in areas with third world countries don't have access to very adequate medical care. Portable medical diagnostic device that moves fluids across sensors without power. That's a pretty nice thing and actually is in use today. It's not entirely based on spaceflight research, but we're able to contribute to the mathematical models of how to move the fluid. So that's a good thing. I mentioned combustion as well. One of my favorite pictures is in the upper left here. A candle flame on earth and a candle flame in microgravity. Totally different, amazingly different idea. Without buoyancy driven convection, a candle flame doesn't look like a candle flame. It burns more like a sphere. You'd think we know a lot about combustion. We've been using fire since, you know, caveman days really, but we don't know a lot about fire. Because of buoyancy driven conduction, because hot air rises, it's kind of turbulent and it makes combustion events hard to study. In microgravity, you take away that buoyancy driven convection and you can really get at what's happening at the molecular level. How is the fuel burning? How is the fuel extinguishing? We're learning things about fuels that we can potentially use to make combustion engines less polluting and more efficient. Something called cool flames is a great example of using a combustion facility in space to learn something about fuel mixtures and maybe about how to actually ignite fuels so that they are, like I said, either burn more efficiently or produce less pollution or both. Protein crystal growth is also being done in the urine space. We're pretty proud of the way we can grow crystals in microgravity now. They're much more perfect. You may have heard of this. We've actually been doing protein and crystal growth for decades and way back on shuttle days. Why is it important to have a quiescent microgravity environment? In the upper left, you see a crystal grown on earth. This is of a particular protein and okay, it's pretty crystal, but that same crystal grown in microgravity, totally different, bigger, more perfect. We can study the structure of the crystal to understand the way the actual protein works in our body. In this case, there's a disease called Duchenne muscular dystrophy. We've now got an inhibitor to that disease because of spaceflight research, which our fingers are crossed. It's still got a ways before it becomes an actual pharmaceutical or an actual drug that can be used on people, but it's an animal trials now and it's on its way to being proven for human use. The same is true for several other diseases as well. The robot arm on the space station, we cannot have built the space station without the cannon arm. It's an amazing, wondrous robotic machine. The technology that was used in the construction of the cannon arm is now being applied in robotic surgeries all over the world. This one particular example is a girl who had several brain tumors in her brain and the surgeon used a robotic technology to remove them all and he credits the cannon arm from NASA and CSA of course, the Canadian Space Agency, with developing a technology to build a robotic arm that can be operated within an MRI magnetic resonance imaging machine so that it had to have no metallic parts, well no magnetically metallic parts. So that's a great achievement. Those robotic devices are deployed all over. Scott Kelly has taken some amazing pictures of Earth. If you're not following him on Twitter or Instagram, look him up. But there's more than just pretty pictures. The pictures that we're seeing can actually be used in some cases for disaster response. Astronauts flying over can serendipitously see say a volcano eruption, as shown, or flood plains, disasters like earthquakes or tsunamis. Because the space station covers about 95% of the populated areas of the planet and we fly over not geosynchronously, so we have different lighting effects that we can see, daytime, evening, sunrise, and of course night, we get a great perspective that we can compare pictures to. And lastly, education. Very important to the space station program that we're reaching the next generation of explorers. And so this number is actually a little bit out of date. At least 42 million students in at least 44 countries have been involved with an educational program, whether it be a ham radio contact or participating in a real spaceflight experiment. So we're real proud of those numbers and I think that's a really good thing that we do. I wanted to show you another picture of the flowers that Scott grew up in the cupola. This was a neat story. I know I'm kind of running a little bit short on time, so I'll hurry. But this is a great story. Scott Kelly was growing flowers and he was following the instructions very well. But they started to grow mold. They started to not do as well. They weren't thriving. And so Scott suggested to the ground team, hey, why don't you just let me take care of the flowers, give them water when I think they need water and don't water them when I think they have too much water. The ground agreed and said, sure, go ahead. You're the man on the scene, so you have a better perspective. And indeed, Scott pulled them through. He saved the plants. He equated it to, you know, looking out on his lawn and just by feel, knowing when that needed more water or not. So he saved the flowers. That was a great thing. They bloomed and he had a nice bouquet for Valentine's Day. For those of you who are going to download this presentation, there's a lot of really nice, there are about four to five minute videos, hey, there's my cat, that give us really nice examples of benefits of space station research to humanity. These are nice to show people at your planetarium or in your museum or just to watch on your own. So those links, I know it's a little bit hard to copy from a PDF, so I apologize for that. But you can probably just type in benefits for humanity to YouTube and or look up some of those titles and you'll see some nice usable content for yourself. And then, of course, we've got a blog, we're on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Always trying to put information out there about what we're doing on the space station. And with that, I think it's time for questions and answers. Thank you very much, Liz. That's really quite a story with Scott Kelly up there and with his brother down here, and I'm looking forward to hearing about the comparisons, as I'm sure you are as well. Very much. So we do have a couple of questions. And so one of the ones, and I have to admit that this that I share this question is, I don't know if you want to, I guess we could leave that up for the screen up for a minute, then it'd be nice to get you there so that everyone can see it. But here's a question that I actually had how do you work with a fluid plastic for 3D printing in microgravity? Okay, so this is going to be kind of to the extent of my knowledge, I might not have the full story here. This was indeed a challenge and it was why we tested this. We've actually tested a couple of different 3D printers on orbit. The first one we tried, the temperature is a little bit off. So there's no convective cooling, of course. There's only radiant cooling. Well, there is convective cooling, but it's not quite the same. It's not as effective as a cooling mechanism because heat doesn't, well, doesn't radiate away in the same way. So it wasn't liquid plastic, obviously 3D printers work by extruding a solid plastic through a heated tip and building layer upon layer. At that point, I guess the plastic is basically liquid. There was some adhesion issues. In fact, the tip was a little bit too hot and adhered the print to the base plate. It was really tough to get it off. So Butch Wilmore had to kind of pry the 3D printed object off of the base plate. They made some adjustments and the next print they did was a little bit better. The next print a little bit better. They ended up printing, I think, about 20, 25 or 30 objects. Some of them had overhangs. Basically they were testing all kinds of properties of 3D printing once they figured out. They knew that convection of heat would be an issue. So I think there's probably a fan, a better fan than in most gravity-bound 3D printers have and that probably helped cool the system. Hopefully that's an adequate answer. If it's not, Google our 3D printer and maybe there's a little more information on there or go to our website. Thanks. Stewart has a question. He says, Has anyone considered sending up a centrifuge that a person could get into to see if exposure to artificial gravity can mitigate the effects of microgravity? Any comments that he would imagine an hour or so in such a centrifuge each day perhaps would be beneficial? So Stewart, this is a question that is near and dear to my heart. I actually worked on a NASA artificial gravity program and we did just that. We took volunteers and we put them in bed rest where their head was slightly lower than their feet. This is a commonly used analog for space flight. So after those people were in bed for about 21 days, every day we gave them about one hour of artificial gravity. We used a big centrifuge. Their head was at the center of the centrifuge, close to it. Their feet was out at the spoke, the end, and we spun the centrifuge around. It gave them a dose of gravity from their head to their feet just like you and I get every day standing up. And that dose of gravity every day helped with mitigating bone loss and muscle loss and cardiovascular deconditioning. We didn't get enough an opportunity to really study everything that we wanted to. It's pretty expensive to do these studies. However, NASA is currently developing protocols and accepting proposals to do another artificial gravity study. This one is actually being done in Germany, I think. Somewhere in Europe might have the location incorrect. But we're doing follow-on studies to find out if artificial gravity might be a good idea. I think the general consensus is that artificial gravity is a really good idea if we're going to go to long-duration space flight. You're bringing your own food, water, oxygen, light. Why not bring your own gravity as well? But it is a very difficult technical challenge to spin a spacecraft, for example. You probably saw the movie, The Martian. And part of that spacecraft was spinning, part of it wasn't. That is pretty tough on the vestibular system to accommodate to going in and out of gravity fields. Is it feasible? Yes. Is it a challenge? Yes. Do I believe we're going to use artificial gravity? Some form of it? Yes. Unless we have a much faster way to get to Mars. Build a better propulsion system. Maybe instead of six months to get to Mars, we get there in a week or two, then maybe you wouldn't need artificial gravity. So one of the ongoing themes of science fiction shows is probably not particularly practical. As a follow-up to the one I just have to pass this on, Tucker, Emily, Ezra, and Mary, who had asked the question about the 3D printing, says thanks for the explanation. It's so cool. But they're also wondering about how a plant knows which direction to grow in. Okay, not a stupid question at all. We're learning about plants as we go as well, and they're tricky. We've been growing plants in space for actually like 30 years, and we're just now getting to the point where we think we have our ducks in a robe, not always. So plants, just like humans, have multiply redundant systems. So plants know to send their root down and their shoot up. Up and down are relative, of course, right? But if the plant screws that up, dead plant. So there's multiply redundant systems to make sure that the root goes toward resources like water and nutrients, and that the shoot goes toward resources like light. So there's something called phototropism in which plants will grow toward light. There's something called gravitropism, which plants will grow opposite of gravity, a gravity vector. There's also something, and I'm blanking on the name, but essentially it's that the root will grow toward resources. So in the lack of gravity, other things become more important, like light or water and nutrients. And plants, believe it or not, can actually forget about the need for gravity. Not all plants, of course, but the ones that we've been playing around with, and they're effectively growing plants without gravity. That's kind of not a plant biologist either, but that's about the extent of my knowledge. Kind of back to our fluid question and the need for gravity. Andy asks, if someone cuts a finger, is a band-aid a simple solution as it is on earth? Does blood clot the same way in space as it does on earth? Yeah. Fortunately, blood pretty much clots the same way as it does on earth. Now, none of us ever wants to see a severe trauma where there's significant blood loss. We expect, well, actually on the vomit comet, NASA's parabolic plane, we have done some studies, not with humans, but potentially with cadaverers or other organisms that can bleed like a human to get our bearings and understanding. And in a trauma situation, we all expected that blood might kind of go everywhere and it really doesn't. It just, remember, fluids without gravity, surface tension becomes a really more powerful, I don't want to call it a force, but a really powerful process. Fluids are very sticky. Fluid molecules, water molecules stick together really well. And so, in a severe blood loss situation, the blood pretty much sticks in a big blob around the wound and doesn't go everywhere. Okay, good. Which of the studies that you mentioned were you involved in yourself? Ah, boy. You know, directly, I haven't been involved really with any of those except for the artificial gravity. I kind of started making sure that other people's science went well. And so, I worked in mission control for actually about four years to be kind of a conduit between the scientist and mission control. Because they speak very different languages. Engineers and mission control, it's all about operations and go or no go or do we have KU contact or not? And the scientist just like, hey, can he move the ultrasound probe so I can see his heart better? So, I was someone who kind of was the go between kind of like a CAPCOM person, but from a science perspective. So, I had to understand what the scientist was saying. And then I had to turn that into something that mission control could understand and turn into an instruction to the astronauts. So, I really enjoyed that job. And so, I was actually involved in a number of those studies. Fluid shifts, the VIP, the eye study, immune studies, bone studies, nutrition studies, all of them. It's been pretty awesome. Okay. So, we've got, we'll go for the last question here. We're at the top of the hour, but since we had our glitch earlier, we won't worry about going just a little bit late. But this is Tucker and Emily et al. I have a follow up to Stuart's question. And this might be more of an engineering question. How do you prevent a reaction wheel type effect occurring in the centrifuge? Would you have two centrifuges? Well, you'd have to have a really good isolation system. And we have learned quite a lot about having good isolation systems because our exercise devices have to be really well isolated from the space station structure, the treadmill. This thing about that one example of someone running, pounding on the structure, that would really put a lot of wear and tear and damage to the joints and solar panels. So, we develop isolation systems, vibration isolation systems. They're passive mostly, gyroscopically controlled or gyroscopically powered and isolated from structure. A centrifuge probably similarly have to be pretty well isolated to prevent any torque or reaction wheel issues, like you mentioned. Okay. Well, that's great. If you could perhaps stop screen sharing, please, Liz. Yes. And that's all for tonight. I want to thank Dr. Warren for coming and sharing with us. I found this to be tremendously fascinating. And I think it's very cool to hear about all this research that's done. And hopefully, I think it would be very cool that my question might have been how many doctors or actual research scientists have actually flown. And maybe you'll get a chance to, even though maybe you don't want to, you don't want to leave your kitty behind, I'm sure. I would love to fly. You can get out one of the 18,300 people that applied. That's remarkable. That's remarkable. So, you can find this telecon along with many others on the Night Sky Network under the Outreach Resources section. Just search for webinar. Tonight's presentation will be posted on the Night Sky Network YouTube page and the dedicated research page, which should be up by the end of the week, hopefully within the next day or two. And the last thing is that I want to put up kind of a teaser for the next time. Our next webinar will be, let's see, where did he go? There we go. And so next month, we are tentatively scheduled for Wednesday, March 16th, where we'll hear from Dr. Orkan Umarhan from NASA Ames Research Center on New Horizons and Pluto. So we're looking forward to hearing from him. So thank you very much, everyone, and have a great evening. Thank you very much, Dr. Warren. Absolutely. We look forward to seeing more adventures in space. There's a couple of questions on chat. Can I stay and just answer a couple more? Oh, sure. By all means. Okay. So I'll stay and answer those extra questions on chat if people want to hang in. So go ahead, so we won't stand on ceremony here. Okay. Well, that was a lot of fun, guys. I enjoyed that. Yeah. So we've still got, everyone's hanging in there. We've still got 32 viewers. So we've got a couple of good questions here. And so we have Darian asked, how do you analyze the eye problems of the astronauts? What sorts of tests do you conduct? So that's what I'm typing in right now. Or should I just verbally say it? Regarding those eye tests, we use a variety. Many of them are the same tests you might get at your own doctor, except some of them not so much. We have an ultrasound, which we're using to look at blood flow and fluid flow. We have something called a fundoscope, which we use to image the retina. So we basically put a big camera up to your eye and take a picture of your retina to see what's happening at your retina. Some of the astronauts, instead of fundoscope, they just call it the fun-o-scope. You know, they're fun. Fundoscope. We use tenometry, a little portable pen that measures pressure within the eye. Tenometry. We have something called OCT, which is an optical computed tomography. That is a high-powered scan, kind of like the fundoscope, but it looks at a really high level at the structure of the eye and the back of the eye, in particular, the retina. Some of the changes that we're seeing in some astronauts are that the retina is getting folded up. Some of them are getting something called a coroidal fold. We're seeing some people with cotton wool spots, which are just fuzzy spots in their retina. I'm not sure what those indicate if it's damage to rods and cones or what. It's obvious. It's actually a pretty serious issue, especially because we don't understand it. When we understand a problem, we know how to go about preventing it. This eye thing is really disconcerting to people. Hopefully, we can get a better idea of what's happening, how to prevent it, and then, well, we'll be in much better shape. Let's just put it that way. I see another test here about cadavers flown on the KC-135 or the vomit comet. I sometimes hesitate to talk about animal models, but the Air Force, I think, did these tests for us. It wasn't necessarily NASA, but sometimes animals that bleed similarly to humans are pigs. We've actually flown some live pigs, which are anesthetized, and we can study some traumatic injuries on pigs to make sure that we know that if an astronaut receives a traumatic injury in space, what we can expect. It's not something we do lightly, obviously. It's not something that we do very often, but it was important to do at least once so that we know what to expect. Hopefully, that's an acceptable answer. There was one more artificial gravity question. Not necessarily involving spinning the whole spacecraft, but just spinning a centrifuge within the spacecraft. Same thing. It is simpler engineering-wise, like you say, Stuart, but still you would need to isolate that small centrifuge from the rest of the structure because, like you said, there may be some torque issues involved or some vibration. We actually, the space station at one time was designed with a small centrifuge for rodents and other organisms like plants. Over the years, the space station structure and design was altered as we went. That centrifuge accommodation module, the CAM, was eventually canceled, unfortunately, but hopefully in the future, maybe we'll be able to have something small again, a little centrifuge that we can test. Let's see. I think that pretty much takes care of all the comments and questions. I want to thank you again for staying a little bit late. It's very gracious of you. Thank you very much. I know it's getting late there in Houston much later than here in San Francisco anyways. No problem. Thank you again. We'll be signing off and we look forward to seeing everyone next month for hearing about Pluto. Maybe someday this research that you're doing will enable people to go out there and even beyond Mars. I think that that'll definitely not be within my lifetime, but hopefully the little kids.